The covers of two books about songs tied to American patriotism say a lot about their content and subject.

John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis’ The Battle Hymn of the Republic is clad in red stripes alternating with strips of music on a cream-colored background, a design evoking the American flag that is fittingly rigid for this serious contemplation of a song born of Civil War strife and infused with religious overtones.

Meanwhile, the breezy cursive and the flag waving on Sheryl Kaskowitz’s God Bless America suggests the opening of a 1940s movie — an appropriate nod to American popular culture given the song’s roots in the entertainment industry.

Both books show how these unofficial anthems acquired their powerful symbolism and how they became ways of suppressing dissent.

After a tedious start, Stauffer and Soskis’ Battle Hymn of the Republic picks up midway through. The authors have written a definitive history of the song and chronicle of our country’s efforts to redefine and readjust itself since the Civil War.

It was fall 1862 when Julia Ward Howe got stuck in a traffic jam on the outskirts of Washington and participated in a singalong of popular songs of the day. One of those was “John Brown’s Body,” a rousing song about the abolitionist whose raid on Harper’s Ferry, Va., preceded the war.

Howe awoke hours later in her hotel room and, almost in a trance, wrote a poem to the song’s tune. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was published in the February 1863 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

That poem and Lincoln’s second inaugural address “represent the most enduring — perhaps the only enduring — theological reflections on the meaning of the Civil War,” Stauffer and Soskis write. Their book traces the “Battle Hymn” to a 17th-century religious revival song, dissects its millennial images stanza by stanza, and highlights subsequent versions and uses of the song.

In addition to a biographical sketch of Howe — who, though primarily associated with the “Battle Hymn,” wrote other poems and also organized a precursor to Mother’s Day — there are profiles of others with ties to the song, including Theodore Roosevelt, John Brown, evangelists Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, and labor leader Ralph Chaplin (who based his “Solidarity Forever” anthem on the song).

Stauffer and Soskis discuss other literary legacies of Howe’s words, including John Steinbeck’s allusion to it in his titling of The Grapes of Wrath and Martin Luther King Jr.’s frequent usage of the lyrics’ imagery. A particularly well-written section of the book discusses King’s “I Have a Dream” and “Mountaintop” speeches. The latter was the civil rights leader’s final speech and concluded abruptly, but powerfully, with King saying: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Sheryl Kaskowitz capitalized on such iconic cultural moments by creating a companion website of audio and video clips related to God Bless America, her book on the World War I-era song that became a patriotic standard during the 1940s.

Irving Berlin wrote “God Bless America” for a military-themed review in 1918, then stashed it away for 20 years until singer Kate Smith asked for a patriotic song she could use on her weekly radio show. Clips of Smith, Berlin and even Richard Nixon singing the title song add another dimension to Kaskowitz’s account of the song, and the way politicians and the American public have used it over the decades are also part of the story.

“It’s not a song about a flag, or liberty, or something like that. It’s a song about home. Instead of the home being a little cottage, it’s America,” Kaskowitz quotes Berlin saying in a 1940 interview.

It became Smith’s theme song, and she performed it weekly beginning in November 1938, the week after Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds broadcast, through January 1941. Smith recorded it several times during her career.

Despite Berlin’s restrictions on who could perform or record it and a ban on dance arrangements, the song was everywhere in the early 1940s, according to Kaskowitz. The phrase “God Bless America,” which had not been commonly heard before 1938, became a standard part of general discourse — and a favorite of politicians.

For others, Berlin’s reference to God made the song anything but universal; Woody Guthrie took such exception to it he wrote a now well-known response called “This Land Is Your Land.”

Kaskowitz references online surveys she conducted, but her hedging and disclaimers render them largely scientifically useless. Much better are her observations about the ways “God Bless America” has been used by opposing sides of the cultural debate and how after 9/11 has become a de rigueur display of patriotism during Major League Baseball games.

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